Orchestrating experiences

Simplicity is desired where complexity abounds. Before, during and after the pandemic, companies recognized the importance of customer experience and the need to make it simpler and easier for their customers and prospects to engage with them. The pandemic, shifting customer needs, changing expectations, rapidly evolving technology and organizational fragmentation have created a significant level of complexity for companies seeking to deliver on the promise of simplicity.

At its heart customer experience should be simple, treat customers well and ensure they feel valued so that new customers come and stay, and current customers keep coming back. The reality is to make it easy for customers and prospects can be hard work for the enterprise to execute.

Increasingly, there are many moving parts that don’t always work well together. Additionally, there are everyday business needs, like hiring, investing in technology, reducing costs, addressing cyber security threats, all of which make it easy to be diverted from the need to work cohesively to deliver the right customer experience in a way that supports delivering compelling customer economics.

To design and deliver compelling customer experiences there needs to be a high degree of orchestration across the business. This orchestration requires breaking down complexity and aligning the business around the customer, based on a deep understanding of the customer, their needs, the marketplace and your organization.

For some this has involved a complete reset; for others, reconceiving how they make the most of potential opportunities; but for all it has meant a fixation on the customer to deliver an experience that ’works’ well.

Achieving significant growth, however, is less straightforward — it requires concentrated thought about the customer (or potential customer), their lives, their problems and their needs. It involves answering the questions: ”Do we need to sell more to existing customers, or do we need to attract new ones? Are there segments that are being underserved with unmet needs?”

The leaders in our index appear to be better than most at addressing the twin aims of simplicity and growth. It is their intimacy with the customer and their deep knowledge of their needs that enables them to move faster with greater certainty and conviction and orchestrate growth across the organization.